The Sisters Rosensweig (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Wendy Wasserstein is recognized not only for the celebration of women in her feminist plays but also for the celebration of her Jewish heritage. She was born on October 8, 1950, in Brooklyn, New York. Wasserstein initially attended the Calhoun School to study dance with Judy Taylor and spent considerable time at Broadway matinees. Her playwriting began in the years she attended Mt. Holyoke College, where she earned a bachelor of arts in history in 1971. During this time, a friend managed to convince Wasserstein to take a playwriting course at Smith College. She was so taken with the genre that, upon graduation from Holyoke, she studied creative writing at City College of the City University of New York, where she received her master of arts.

In an interview with Esther Cohen in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, she shares her recollections on when she really began writing. Wasserstein remembers writing something called the Mother-Daughter Fashion Show in high school, to get out of gym: "I know very little about fashion, but they used to have this Mother-Daughter Fashion Show and you got to leave school to go." According to Wasserstein, "if you wrote it you didn't have to go to gym class for like two or three weeks. It was fantastic. So I started writing those."

Wasserstein developed an intense love for playwriting, her love for the genre eventually taking her to Yale. She developed a passion for Russian literature and immersed herself in it. In consequence, a certain Russian style is evident in her writing, particularly reflecting the works of Anton Chekov, whose influence appears in many of her works. The rumblings of Chekov's Three Sisters in the background, for example, subtly influence The Sisters Rosensweig.

The situational comedies she writes maintain a certain reserve, in keeping with her former studies. The action of her plays is limited, yet the characters go through tremendous life changes. In Tender Offer, for example, a family reaches a new level of mutual understanding through communication. Wasserstein's greatest achievement was The Heidi Chronicles, a work that earned her a Pulitzer in 1989. It is a feminist documentary, of sorts, tracing the life of one woman for over twenty-five years as she moves through the 1960s to the 1990s in her search for identity. Further awards include the Tony Award for best play, League of American Theaters and Producers, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award, all in 1989 for The Heidi Chronicles; and an Outer Critics Circle Award and Tony Award nomination for best play, 1993, for The Sisters Rosensweig.